E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India: A Tragedy of Cultural Conflicts and Distorted Interracial Relationships

Abstract

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, hereafter (API), offers us an opportunity to realize the mentality of the white imperialist and the grotesque picture of the colonizer-colonized relationship; this picture implies multiple facets of racial vituperations, brutality, and prejudice perpetrated on Indians in the colonial period. In the novel, Forster explores the colonizers’ racist attitudes, and he brings out the racial and interracial conflicts as well as the cultural and ethnic traumas between the colonizer and the colonized. This study is primarily concerned with exploring the cultural clashes and the problematic, deformed interracial relationships, established between the Indians and the Anglo-Indians in a colonial context. The analytical approach and the Postcolonial Theory will be adopted throughout the paper as a framework. A postcolonial reading of the novel debunks the colonizer’s racist ideology and reveals various motifs of partitions, fences, interracial conflicts and gulfs. The article reveals that the different racial, cultural, and social backgrounds of the English and Indian communities create bitter differences and significant gaps that cannot be bridged. The study concludes that the ramifications of the interracial clashes and racial intolerance have a vehement impact on both the colonized and the colonizer alike; however, mutual and interracial love, respect, and understanding are robust solutions that can relatively open the ideological closure of racism, lessen the racial tensions and thus bring people of different racial backgrounds together.